El Salvador: Monitoring the Humanitarian Response - Bulletin N° 1 | April 2022
Situation Update and Developments
The Protection sector is prioritizing the following actions for 2022, in line with the Humanitarian Response Plan’s established objectives: i) strengthen institutional technical capacities regarding protection; ii) assist people at risk; iii) strengthen access to rights and services; and iv) promote peaceful coexistence and strengthen community structures. Sector organizations, together with other humanitarian actors, are focusing on strengthening the self-sufficiency and resilience of people in vulnerable situations through access to rights and services such as housing, documentation, sexual and reproductive health, education, skills training, and opportunities to make a living, especially for women, girls, boys and teenagers, people with disabilities, the LGBTIQ+ population and members of ethnic minorities.
To this end, the sector is carrying out monitoring at borders and a mapping of organizations with protection operations to identify the profiles of people in need, strengthen community’s capacities for creating spaces to raise awareness of local protection mechanisms and reinforce work in areas where more cases are detected, all in coordination with sector partners.
The sector is also strengthening the Areas of Responsibility together with the Child Protection and Gender-Based Violence (GBV) subsectors, holding regular meetings and coordinating humanitarian response in these areas.
The GBV subsector, now comprised of 17 members after integrating more United Nations agencies and international civil society organizations, has made progress in developing capacity-building tools for GBV prevention and mitigation in humanitarian contexts. The subsector is also in the process of incorporating national civil society organizations and Government institutions to ensure their representation in the sector and work in concert to respond and prevent GBV.
The Education sector continues to monitor the educational situation of Salvadorean children. Since the first quarter of 2022, when the national education system announced the return to schools under an open-door policy, classroom attendance gradually increased compared to 2021. Access to education improved, thanks to the Ministry of Education’s delivery of laptops to facilitate connectivity for students and teachers. However, sector member organizations face challenges in finding adequate funding for additional interventions to support the improvement of basic services in schools.
Emergency funds from the European Union Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Commission (ECHO) have supported the Ministry of Education in implementing the Language and Literature Learning Strengthening Strategy in Salvadorean schools (ESLengua) through actions directed toward learning recovery, including teacher training.
The Logistics and Telecommunications sector has analyzed how the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic have affected product imports into El Salvador, which may lead to a rise in prices and increase the processing time for international procurements for the remainder of the year. As a key activity, the World Food Programme (WFP), as part of the sector, updated their emergency food response flowchart to serve as a reference for the rest of the member organizations.